Beneficial Babies

Click on the link below to see a brief video of a beneficial baby on my garden roses. Beneficial babies The little guy is actually a predatory maggot that crawls about your plants and eats aphids for you. The adult is a fly that tries very hard to look like a dangerous bee that will sting you. But she can’t sting. She can’t even bite! Here’s

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Harbingers of Spring

Spring is springing in the Pacific Northwest. One of the earliest signs of spring is the flowering of the native hazelnut trees, Corylus cornuta. It’s long golden catkins dangle from slender branches and catch the sunlight, lighting up the forest where it grows.   Tiny female flowers are housed separately from the long, supple catkin filled with male flowers. The female flowers will mature into

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Secret Gardens of Santa Fe

On a tour of secret gardens in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kathryn and I peek behind adobe walls for tantalizing glimpses of hidden treasures. Organized by the Santa Fe Botanical Gardens, the tour provides access to several small urban gardens not normally visible to passersby. A beautifully sophisticated yet rustic fence made of reddish twigs defines the boundary between the garden and the natural environment

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Tomato Memories

Today we pay tribute to David’s father, Lawrence Edwin Deardorff, who passed away on May 11 at the age of 97. Larry first took David into the garden when he was 6 years old, and he learned about the world of plants at his father’s side. Larry was an avid gardener his entire life, and became our partner when David and I owned Island Biotropix,

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Garden Art

Garden Art means different things to different people. In the vegetable garden it can take the form of a screen to mask the compost bin, or a painting on the side of the tool shed. Some of us – and by us I mean gardeners – take care to lay out our herb gardens to create patterns that please the eye. Then we add decorative

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Birds and their Trees

As many of you may realize by now, while David and I are avid gardeners, our passion is the gateway to nature that the garden provides. As we arrive in New Mexico, so does spring, with all its chaotic and unpredictable weather. Red buds bloom along with plums, lilacs, and cottonwood. And then it snows, and gardeners and farmers worry about their incipient apricots, cherries,

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Permaculture and Edible Schoolyards

San Diego, CA – We visit the San Diego Botanical Garden, in Encinitas, where we find many treasures including a small Permaculture Demonstration Garden. Permaculture, a concept developed originally by Bill Mollison of Australia, is a contraction of “Permanent and Agriculture”. It is a very rich system that stresses the use of perennial rather than annual plants, and employs many techniques that can be put

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The Long and Winding Road

David and I pack our belongings and prepare to leave our friend’s house in Arcata, California. To add drama, I might have added “meager” to describe our belongings, but that would not be accurate. We’ve brought plenty of comfort items on this road trip. We arrived in Arcata the day before from McMinnville, where we had our last bookstore event in Oregon. We stopped in

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Our First Reading, Signing, Plant Clinic

Village Books in Bellingham, Washington, hosted our first bookstore appearance of the Great ‘Here Come the Plant Docs’ Book Tour of 2010. There is something very comforting about beginning such a venture talking about a book surrounded by good books, in the company of bibliophiles and phytophiles. On this, my first trip to Bellingham, I discovered what a delightful town it is. Kathy, at the

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Spring Cleaning

A February Friday, unusually warm and sunny. Spring is here. Friends already lay out their soaker hoses, sow seeds indoors, and move seedlings out into their cold-frames. We’re going to miss all that this year, as we travel to talk about our book, and other topics from the greenworld. We won’t bemoan the loss too much. Surely an exciting journey lies ahead. David and I

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